Knowledge and Organization of Guard Dogs in the Nazi Concentration Camps: The Hundestaffeln

In March 1943, six Russian prisoners of war escaped from a factory in Neustadt where they had been forced to work. To recapture them, the German authorities dispatched SS-Untersturmführer Koermann and SS-Rottenführer Duske from the Hundestaffel “dog squad” at Flossenbürg concentration camp. The men and their dogs tracked the escapees, who were successfully recaptured on 10 March 1943. As a reward, Duske was allowed a three-day leave.1
This blog post explores the circulation of knowledge in the Nazi concentration camp system about the use of guard dogs and the dog handlers of the Hundestaffeln. It examines camp documentation from the Central Construction Office in Auschwitz concentration camp and from the International Tracing Service Archive of the Arolsen Archives. As a result, it shows how knowledge about the Hundestaffeln moved both within and between camps, as well as to and from central offices in Berlin and the rest of the camp network. Letters, plans, and orders that traveled through the administrative system of the Third Reich reveal how dog squads were established, trained, deployed, and recognized within the camp system.
This post is divided into three sections. First, it outlines the history of the Hundestaffeln and the current state of historical knowledge and understanding about them. Second, it explores how the infrastructure for dog units in the concentration camps was created and the media through which information about them circulated both within and between different organs of the Nazi state. Third, it identifies the networks of guard dog handlers and knowledge about their work that moved through the concentration camp system. These reflections reveal how the Hundestaffeln operated according to shared policies across the camps. To close, the blog suggests how our understanding of the dog units can contribute to the history of the Holocaust.
Who Were the Hundestaffeln?
The Hundestaffeln were specialized groups within the SS-Totenkopfverbände, literally translated as “Death’s Head Units,” whose symbol was a skull and who were responsible for administering the system of concentration camps across Europe. Their dog units, comprised of guard dogs and their handlers, were deployed both inside and outside concentration camps to maintain control over prisoners. Documents in the Arolsen Archive reveal the presence of Hundestaffeln in the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Gross Rosen, Flossenbürg, Sachsenhausen, Stutthof, Dachau, Buchenwald, Majdanek, and Neuengamme.Despite the animals often being mentioned in survivor accounts and represented on models of concentration camps, little has been written about guard dogs by researchers of the Holocaust. This lacuna was exacerbated in 2016 when a hoax article published the previous year was uncovered. The article, based on fictitious evidence, made absurd claims about generations of German dogs and traditions of violence. Its publication resulted in increased calls for academic rigor in peer review.2That it seems to have discouraged researching the role of dogs during the Holocaust, especially within German-speaking academia, is an unfortunate consequence of the scandal: it has prevented any real, evidence-based account of this aspect of Holocaust history, which survivors seem to remember so vividly.
In addition, what little historical research on guard dogs in the camps has thus far been written is severely limited in quality. Robert Tindol’s chapter in a 2013 book on “Animals and War,” for example, paid more attention to questions of animal cruelty than it did to understanding how dogs were used in the camps. Tindol even went so far as to argue that because the image of the guard dog was so well-known, “[i]t is unnecessary to recount evidence that each and every camp employed guard dogs of some sort.”3 As Human/Animal Studies struggles to define itself, however, recounting this evidence is of the utmost importance. Furthermore, examining the documentary evidence of guard dogs reveals elements of the history that would otherwise be lost, including the extensive knowledge that perpetrators had about their use and how they shared this knowledge through the concentration camp system. This blog post charts some of the documentary sources available on this topic, suggesting how they can be used to enhance our understanding of knowledge about the Hundestaffeln during the Holocaust.
Creating the Hundestaffeln: Building Infrastructure
In July 1942, the Central Construction Office at Auschwitz drew up plans for kennels in Auschwitz-Birkenau to house 250 dogs.4 These plans were sent to the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office in Berlin, which approved the plans in a letter responding to the construction office at Auschwitz in October 1942.5 Due to construction issues, however, the planners were forced to revise their project and submit it for approval once again to the Commissioner for the Construction Industry in Katowice.6 The commissioner approved these revised plans in February 1943 with the stipulation that construction be completed using prisoner labor and not outside resources.7 These conditions were reflected in new plans that the construction office completed in March 1943.8
This series of letters between Auschwitz, Berlin, and Katowice shows how the camp was connected with outside offices and authorities that transferred knowledge about the approved construction processes for building kennels. This transfer went both ways as central offices passed out directives and the camp planners, in turn, informed them about how they would be implemented. Some form of policy emerges from their communication about the kennels, revealing established practices and procedures. While similar letters from other camps have not been found, work orders from Buchenwald and Flossenbürg indicate that prisoner labor was regularly used to construct and maintain dog kennels in those camps, too.9 The letters with the central construction office at Auschwitz, therefore, both reflected and communicated practices across the camp system.
Camp authorities also spread knowledge about the duties and roles of dog handlers. This is particularly visible in internal communication within concentration camps, each of which administered its own group of guards. In Gross Rosen, for example, the commandant took a specific approach to training members of the Hundestaffel, directing that female guards be trained. In a series of orders in December 1944, he directed eight Aufseherinnen (female guards) from six subcamps of Gross Rosen to receive training to become dog handlers.10 These orders expressed his understanding about the dog handlers’ role and its gendered possibilities. The Gross Rosen documents are somewhat representative of a wider trend across the camp system as many female guards, were also dog handlers. This has created a certain narrative of Aufseherinnen using dogs as “a tool to physically extend [their] power and authority” in an “environment of masculinity that permeated the concentration camp.”11 Although the use of dogs certainly gave the female guards more power over prisoners, training women as dog handlers does not appear to have been a direct policy across the camps: records from the Arolsen Archives refer to male dog handlers at Auschwitz, Stutthof, Flossenbürg, Dachau, and Buchenwald.12 Apart from this gendered specificity at Gross Rosen, the commandant’s orders show that knowledge about the roles of the Hundestaffeln and the existence of organized training was passed through the subcamps.
Networks of People and Knowledge

Letters and orders were not the only way that knowledge about the Hundestaffeln was passed through the camp system. Dog handlers were frequently transferred from camp to camp as they were deployed and redeployed where they were most needed. Documents from the International Tracing Service chart several transfers of Hundestaffel personnel between concentration camps in 1943 and 1944. In August 1943, four dog handlers were transferred from Auschwitz to Stutthof.13 Towards the end of October 1943, one dog handler, SS-Sturmmann Albert Papendick, was posted from Dachau to Stutthof before being sent with nine other dog handlers from Stutthof to Buchenwald at the beginning of November.14 It is noteworthy that two dog handlers – Papendick and fellow SS-Sturmmann Oswald Hausmann – appear on documentation from several camps. While the transfer orders traced Papenick’s journey from Dachau through Stutthof to Buchenwald, Hausmann is mentioned in a document from Gross Rosen, where he was advised to take a leave of absence for convalescence before reappearing almost a year later on the transfer list from Auschwitz to Stutthof.15 These journeys reveal how certain members of the Hundestaffeln saw service across the network of concentration camps, bringing along their knowledge about how to use dogs in the camps.
These types of movement came in addition to the redeployment of the Hundestaffeln within the confines of individual concentration camps. In August 1943, for example, members of the Hundestaffel at Stutthof were transferred from one commander to another when the concentration camp had new kennels built further away from their former barracks.16 Later, in November 1944, the Hundestaffel group from Auschwitz-Birkenau was transferred to Auschwitz-I, along with three groups of Aufseherinnen.17 These internal redeployments indicate the extent to which camp administrators thought consciously about how and where they wanted to use the dogs. They suggest that camp commanders were well aware of their special status and abilities as a unit and possessed knowledge about how they should be used within the camp.

Such knowledge was, probably, behind the decision in March 1943 to deploy Koermann and Duske from the Flossenbürg Hundestaffel to search for the escaped Russian prisoners of war. Details of their success were published in notices from the command orders of the Flossenbürg Command Staff in 1943, recognizing and, for Duske, rewarding his accomplishment with extra days of leave.18 By publishing this achievement, the Flossenbürg commanders spread knowledge about the utility of the Hundestaffeln. Unlike the orders or letters from other camps, which indicated knowledge about policy, this notice shared more anecdotal knowledge about their work. It reveals more details about the dogs as trackers, which is surprisingly lacking in other documents.
The Hundestaffeln and the History of the Holocaust
Camp documentation like that discussed here will never give deep insight into how prisoners understood and perceived the Hundestaffeln. In fact, they even give little information about the daily work of dog handlers. Details about the threatening nature of dogs and their ability to project power, instill fear, and sometimes even inflict pain are found more regularly in the memories of survivors, who describe how dogs were present at key moments in camp life, including during the selection and management of work groups.
What these documents do provide is deep insight into the knowledge that camp administrators had about how to establish and deploy the Hundestaffeln and their transmission of that knowledge within and beyond the camp system. Established policies communicated from central offices in Berlin regulated how kennels for guard dogs in camps were built and maintained. Camp commanders trained their staff in how to become members of the Hundestaffeln, and dog handlers themselves moved between camps, taking their knowledge with them. Various kinds of directives, plans, and memoranda about dog keeping, therefore, circulated through the offices of the SS, via various modes of transmission. Together, these examples point to a network of circulated knowledge about the utility and effectiveness of dog handling in the concentration camps. Recognizing this knowledge integrates the history of dogs and their handlers into that of the concentration camps, adding to our understanding of Nazi bureaucracy and revealing previously neglected aspects of the Holocaust.
Barnabas Balint completed his doctorate in History at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. His research focuses on Jewish experiences of the Holocaust, especially in Hungary. He is currently the 2024/5 Miles Lerman Center for the Study of Jewish Resistance Research Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
- Notice from the command orders of the Flossenbürg Command Staff, 1943, 1.1.8.0/82107265/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Florian Peters, “Von totalitären Schäferhunden und libertären Mauerkaninchen.”[↩]
- Robert Tindol, “The Best Friend of the Murderers: Guard Dogs and the Nazi Holocaust,” in Animals and War, ed. Ryan Hediger, 105–21 (2013), 106.[↩]
- Architectural map plan for 250 kennels in Birkenau, 29 July 1942, USHMMA RG-11.001M.03, Reel 34, p. 1954.[↩]
- Letter to the Central Construction Office Auschwitz, 16 October 1942, USHMMA RG-11.001M.03, Reel 47, p. 647–48.[↩]
- Letter regarding provision of iron and wood for kennels, 22 October 1942; memo on Birkenau dog kennel construction issues, 29 October 1942; letter regarding delivery of materials for dog kennels, 27 November 1942, all USHMMA RG-11.001M.03, Reel 47, pp. 649–50, and pp. 650-52 and Reel 32, p. 1700, respectively.[↩]
- Letter to the Central Construction Office of the Waffen SS and Police at Auschwitz, 11 February 1943, USHMMA RG-11.001M.03, Reel 23, p. 1446.[↩]
- Cost estimate and list of resources needed for 250 dog kennels in Birkenau, 11 March 1943; construction plan for dog kennels in Auschwitz, 11 March 1943, USHMMA RG-11.001M.03, Reel 34, p. 1953, and p. 1952, respectively.[↩]
- Request for prisoner labor to dog kennels in Flossenbürg, 8 Dec 1943; request for prisoner labor to dog kennels in Flossenbürg, 3 Jan 1944; request for prisoner labor to dog kennels in Flossenbürg, 7 Dec 1943, 1.1.8.0/82107911, and 82107925, and 82107910, respectively, ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025; Buchenwald prisoner work detachment daily report, 6 Aug 1943, 1.1.5.0/82069064/ITS Digital Archive, Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- List of women to be trained as dog handlers, KL Gross Rosen, undated; request from SS-Obersturmbannführer to SS-Sturmbannführer Hassebroek to inform them which KL supervisors should be trained as dog handlers; order for women to report for training as dog handlers, KL Gross Rosen, 13 December 1944; order for women to report for training as dog handlers, KL Parschnitz, 1.1.11.0/82111483, and 82111473, and 82111484, and 82111485, respectively, ITS Digital Archives. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Charlotte Mears, “A Social History of the Aufseherinnen of Auschwitz,” PhD dissertation, University of Kingston, 2020, p. 217.[↩]
- See, for example, a list of male Hundestaffel members in Command Order No. 79, Stutthof Concentration Camp, 6 Nov 1943, 1.1.41.0/82153112/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Command Order No. 60, Stutthof Concentration Camp, 24 Aug 1943, 1.1.41.0/82153105/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Command Order No. 76, 23 October 1943; command Order No. 79, Stutthof Concentration Camp, 6 Nov 1943, 1.1.41.0/82153965, and 82153112, respectively, ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Medical report on SS Sturmmann Oswald Hausmann, 2 Sept 1942, 5.1/82305402/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Command order No. 57, Stutthof Concentration Camp, 14 Aug 1943, 1.1.41.0/82153099/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Position order 29/44, 1.1.2.0/82349801/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
- Notice from the command orders of the Flossenbürg Command Staff, 1943, 1.1.8.0/82107265/ITS Digital Archive. Accessed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on 7 April 2025.[↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Barnabas Balint (April 10, 2025). Knowledge and Organization of Guard Dogs in the Nazi Concentration Camps: The Hundestaffeln. History of Knowledge. Retrieved April 21, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13q35